COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Combat Fatigue
Jeanine Plant, WireTapMag
November 10, 2006
Young Iraq Veterans may have left the war behind, but they're morevulnerable than ever. Without their rifles or their units, many have
to battle the demons of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder alone.
Gordie is 25 years old and can't bear to drive a car. He's stopped
shopping at Walmart because the sound of children crying and parents
yelling was too disquieting. For months, when he went to bars, he
couldn't stomach people standing behind him. One day while ascending
the steps of a South Philadelphia subway station, he spied five women
wearing burkas, broke out into a cold sweat, restrained an
overwhelming anger, and had to stop walking to regain composure.
Lately, he's been having trouble sleeping.
Gordie's experiences are not uncommon, however disturbing they may
seem. From 2004 to 2005, he served as a sergeant in Iraq, and now
believes he's suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),
the psychiatric affliction that can follow military combat or
exposure to a threat of death or serious injury.
According to a March 2006 study published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association, 20 percent of Iraq veterans will suffer
from some sort of mental health problem when they come home. Many of
these veterans -- including the youngest among them -- will
experience symptoms associated with PTSD. Some will seek treatment
while others will suffer in silence.
Though Gordie hasn't been diagnosed yet, he exhibits some core
characteristics of the disorder. He doesn't drive a car because when
he has, he says there is an "intense rush that comes back." It
reminds him of the fear he felt riding a Humvee in Iraq; it was
struck several times by roadside bombs.
"It was getting to the point where I was missing work, because I
didn't want to drive to work," Gordie said. He's now interning with
Iraq Veterans Against the War, an anti-war group based in
Philadelphia, Pa., and he doesn't have to drive to get there. But
he's not alone in having trouble staying employed. According to the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 15 percent of veterans aged 20 to 24
years were jobless as of November 2005.
Gordie's aversion to driving may be a symptom of "avoidance" or
"unwanted remembering. " His behavior in bars could be understood as
"arousal" or "hypervigilance. " His encounter with the Muslim women on
the streets of Philadelphia precipitated what's called "physical activation."
"Irritability and anger is a common issue, but one we see universally
is hypervigilance, " said Greg Leskin, the acting assistant director
for the National Center for PTSD, a special program in Palo Alto,
Calif., within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Demond Mullins, 24, is another recent veteran who served in Iraq as
part of the U.S. Army National Guard from 2004 to 2005. He has been
diagnosed with PTSD and describes classic hypervigilance tendencies:
"I would go out to eat with my girlfriend, and I would always want to
sit in the booth so my back could be up against the wall, so I could
watch people."
Hypervigilance, unwanted remembering, trouble sleeping and physical
activation are just a handful of the symptoms associated with PTSD.
Others include disturbing nightmares, reliving the traumatic event,
avoidance -- of family, of places, of topics -- anything that might
elicit the unnerving sensation of being back in Iraq. And detachment.
When Gordie came home for a 30-day leave period from Iraq, he said he
isolated himself at his brother's apartment. "I just freaked out," he
remembers. "I didn't want to be around family or friends. I was
getting stoned all day long. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was
going to freak out because I didn't have a rifle. I couldn't stand
being in a crowd."
He also says he's felt estranged from his family since he's been
back. When he tells them some of what he's been through, he's greeted
with unsatisfying responses. "Most people just look at you," he says.
Mullins has felt the same way: "If a vet tells a civilian about his
experiences, that he's killed people, either the civilian distances
himself from him or praises him. Both of them are not reactions that
the veteran wants him to have. On the one hand, [the veteran] wants
feedback, but then he realizes how alienated he is."
The source of alienation
Gordie has seen innocent civilians arbitrarily assaulted in their
homes. He's seen the deaths of fellow soldiers, a car shot up, on
fire, "covered in melted flesh," and rounds of ammunition fired
randomly into unknown villages. A ten-year-old boy was shot, while
Gordie watched, unable to help, because he was behind a line Gordie
was not allowed to cross. The young vet describes a woman whose
entire face had been blown off. "That face was gone," he says, "and I
can't stop thinking about it."
Mullins has also seen what he calls pure "recklessness. " He says he's
witnessed "kids killed, innocent people killed." And now, in
retrospect, he finds himself in a stew of remorse, questioning
everything. "Maybe I should have objected. Maybe it wasn't on purpose."
For 22-year-old Joshua M., who served as a medic in the airborne
infantry in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, the problem is not what he's
seen, but what he's still seeing.
Just the other morning he says he looked outside his college
classroom windows in Manhattan, and was transported to Iraq. The
faded red brick triggered the image of a pool of blood. He said his
hands felt like they were covered with the stuff. He could feel his
helmet and his uniform. He was returned to a fateful night when he
and his unit mistook for criminals a group of "innocent [Iraqi]
civilians" who had merely been racing to get home before curfew.
Joshua says he saw their parents there, too. His eyes welled up with
tears right there, in the middle of class.
"In adulthood, (18 to 60 years of age) core symptoms remain static,"
Leskin wrote via email about the differences between older and
younger patients with PTSD.
"However, they get manifested in age-appropriate ways. For example,
perhaps due to concentration problems secondary to PTSD, a younger
person might struggle at school. Perhaps a younger person becomes
more affected socially (alienation) due to anger problems. While this
is certainly true for any age group, there might be particular
vulnerabilities at the younger age."
Leskin says he treats his patients accordingly. For some younger,
more tech-savvy patients, he says: "We are delivering
psycho-education via iPod technology. We are using virtual reality therapy."
Joshua keeps his intrusive thoughts at bay Lithium and Paxil and
speaks to a social worker for 45 minutes every week, a service that
is covered through the VA for two years.
Mullins sought help from the VA last November, after being home for
two months, but was largely disappointed. He visited with a social
worker who dredged up his family life prior to the war, which
compounded his level of frustration. "I think that it is very
possible that she was trying to touch on something else to attribute
all of my frustration to that, rather than to my experience in the war."
Mullins' social-worker sessions lasted all of three weeks. "Talking
to a civilian wasn't working for me," Mullins recalls. "This woman
had absolutely no point of reference." Fortunately, in the last six
months, he's found that his symptoms have subsided.
Gordie, on the other hand, still feels debilitated in many ways. But
when he sought assistance from the VA, he became impatient with their
protocols. "You go from one line to another," he says. While sitting
in one waiting room, Gordie says he saw vets from other wars, "men
with canes," and became so unhinged, he left. "You are sitting in a
hospital, and you think, this is what I am going to end up being in 20 years."
"Right now I find that as long as I am around other soldiers from
Iraq," Gordie says, "then I feel okay." He's found the camaraderie he
craves in groups like Vets4Vets, a national outreach group created by
Iraqi vets to help build community, and in Iraq Veterans Against the
War. But he says he does plan to return to the VA to apply for disability.
"To get diagnosed and compensated [for] PTSD, the claims process
could take a year or two," says Ilona Meagher, the editor of the PTSD
Combat Blog, and author of the upcoming book "Moving a Nation to
Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops."
But she says it's hard to point fingers at the VA. "Every
[geographical] area, every unit is different," she says.
Not everyone agrees. According to a 2005 Government Accountability
Office (GAO) Report commissioned by Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., a member
of the Committee on Veterans Affairs, the VA "has failed to implement
key recommendations offered by its own Special Advisory Committee on
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to improve mental health care for
service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. "
The GAO focused on the 24 of the advisory committee's recommendations
-- related to clinical care and education -- and reported that the VA
is not fully equipped to address the needs of veterans from Iraq and
Afghanistan while providing for veterans from past wars.
The VA disputes the GAO's findings, and says that the GAO's report is
a misrepresentation of their ability to provide care to Iraqi Vets.
But some vets are dubious. In the new documentary, The Ground Truth,
directed by Patricia Foulkrod, for instance, one Iraqi veteran
alleged to be a victim of PTSD claims to have been misdiagnosed with
a personality disorder. He suspects it is done to deprive him of the
full disability compensation package.
Dealing with the VA bureaucracy might be only part of the problem,
says Ilona Meagher, who adds that, "some of these people are having
the hardest time working through the stigma."
In fact, according to the July 2004 study, Combat Duty in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems and Barriers to Care, published
by the New England Journal of Medicine, the perceived stigma of
appearing mentally weak among members of the military is an
"important barrier to receiving mental health services." After
issuing an anonymous survey to members of four U.S. combat infantry
units, the NEJM found that only 23 percent to 40 percent of those
attesting to signs of mental disorder ever sought mental health care.
And those who admitted to experiencing symptoms of mental illness
were twice as likely to report concern about possible stigmatization.
The report's authors also urge more studies on the "all volunteer
force deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, " as "the type of warfare
conducted in these regions are very different from those involved in
past wars."
The devastating consequences
The PTSD Timeline, created and compiled by members of the ePluribus
Media community (including Ms. Meagher), keeps a record of what "some
of our troops are experiencing" after they've come back from Iraq or
Afghanistan. And the amount of incidents listed -- arrests, sexual
assaults, homicides and suicides -- are staggering.
In the war zone, it's even more disturbing.
In May 2006, the Hartford Courant reported the U.S. Military has kept
Iraqi soldiers in combat even after superiors have been notified of
suicidal tendencies or other signs of mental illness. In 2005, the
suicide rate among troops in Iraq "reached an all-time high,"
according to the report. Twenty-two soldiers killed themselves in 2005 alone.
When Gordie came back from Iraq, he wrote up part of his story in a
first-person narrative for the Concord Monitor, a New Hampshire
newspaper. He wrote, "war is hell, and it takes the kindest men and
turns them into monsters."
In the piece, he relates the story about two boys would stand and
stare at the U.S. troops and arouse suspicion. "I told my gunner not
to worry about them -- they were kids and there was nothing to fear
from them," he wrote.
Well, "one day a roadside bomb hit a unit on that route," and Gordie
and his platoon were required to question everyone in the immediate
vicinity. As it happened, a soldier noticed the young boys were
trying to hide something, and "found a notebook filled with
information on all the U.S. convoys that had traveled the highway in
the past month." The boys were selling "the information to men from
Baghdad" to feed their families.
Many soldiers secretly suffer from PTSD because they can't accept the
implied message it would send. According to Jose Vasquez, of the New
York chapter of IVAW, soldiers don't want to go from being "heroes"
to being "victims" or "monsters." As for Gordie, though, the
experience with the two young boys sparked an epiphany: "It was a
demoralizing thing to realize that they are fighting to survive, that
I am the foreigner in Iraq, that I'm the one screwing things up."
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